Watch Out Urbanites, Here Come the Carnivores

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Raccoons, skunks, possums and certain other animals have long
been city dwellers, but now larger wild carnivores are moving
into urban areas, according to a symposium presented today at
EcoSummit 2012, an international conference held in Columbus,
Ohio.

Leading the way are coyotes, which have established a territory
just five miles from Chicago O'Hare International Airport. They
appear to be paving the way for other large mammalian carnivores.

"Mountain lions are already living in the outskirts of Los
Angeles, Denver, and other western cities," Stanley Gehrt, who
led the research, told Discovery News. "Black bears are living in
a variety of cities in the West and in the East. Wolves have yet
to make a regular appearance, but they are getting closer. In
Europe, there are urban brown bears that act much like raccoons
over here."

Gehrt, an associate professor of environment and natural
resources at Ohio State University, is studying the phenomenon,
with a focus on coyotes. Since 2000, he and his team have
captured and placed radio collars on about 680 coyotes, with 50
or 60 being tracked at any one time.

Gehrt estimates that about 2000 coyotes live in the Chicago metro
area. They are sharing the territory with 9 million people in
some 250 separate municipalities.

As for why coyotes and other predators are moving nearer to us,
there are a few different reasons. One, he said, is that "as
cities continue to expand and development consumes land, we are
moving into their territories."

Like humans, the large animals are also attracted to the relative
ease of city living. Gehrt explained that "they don't have to go
far to find food and water. They're finding everything they need
right there, in the suburbs of Chicago."

He believes coyotes could be a test case for other animals, such
as wolves, mountain lions and bears. Mountain lions have already
been seen on the fringes of cities, with one shot very close to
the Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago.

Coexisting with such predators often makes humans uneasy, but
Gehrt and others suspect that we're probably going to have to get
accustomed to the situation.

"It used to be rural areas where we would have this challenge of
coexistence versus conflict with carnivores," he said. "In the
future, and I would say currently, it's cities where we're going
to have this intersection between people and carnivores."

He continued, "We used to think only little carnivores could live
in cities, and even then we thought they couldn't really achieve
large numbers. But we're finding that these animals are much more
flexible than we gave them credit for and they're adjusting to
our cities."

Government eradication programs have proven to be costly and
unpopular. While interactions with the big carnivores can be
dangerous, their presence actually benefits us more.

Coyotes, for example, enjoy feasting on deer that also may thrive
in suburbia. Gehrt pointed out that "more people are injured and
killed by deer-auto collisions than are threatened by
carnivores." Coyotes also dine on rodents, bugs, rabbits and
geese, providing a benefit by reducing human exposure to diseases
carried by those species.

Unfortunately for pet owners, coyotes and the other large meat
eaters may also occasionally kill cats and smaller dogs left
outside. Stewart Breck of the USDA National Wildlife Research
Center recommends not leaving food out for pets or intentionally
feeding coyotes.

Breck told Discovery News that he agrees with Gehrt's assessment.
The focus of his research now "is to determine if urban coyotes
are bolder or more aggressive than rural coyotes and whether we
can alter the behavior of coyotes by getting members of the
public to actively engage coyotes when they encounter them."

Often coyotes will run away if people yell and wave their arms,
"reestablishing human dominance," Breck said. But he advises not
to engage a mother coyote with pups, as she will likely try to
defend them no matter what.